Posts Filed Under going pro

Winter is nigh (sorry, peeps, face into it), bringing with it the 2014 Winter edition of Publix Grape Magazine.

I’m still fortunate enough to be penning items for Grape, including this time out several wine pairing write-ups, including desserts and other seasonal recipes. So, if you’re hankering to know what supermarket wines might pair up with a Double Apple Crisp with Salted Bourbon Caramel Sauce, or Squash & Lentil Salad with Hazelnut Vinaigrette, you’ll want to head over to one of their locations and check out the issue (try not to drool over the food porn too much, okay?).

For this issue, I’ve also provided an introduction to the topic of wine tannins (including a primer on which grapes have lower / higher pucker-up tannin potential, from Gamay to Tannat) for their In Focus section.

Well, the Global Interweb’s recent fixation with infographics seems to have abated by exactly zero percent.

That’s the primary takeaway I’ve had, anyway, from my recent experience penning a couple of infographic-designed articles for Fix.com. Seems you people can’t get enough of that stuff!

I wrote two such pieces for Fix.com: an overview of Off The Beaten Path White Wine Varieties, and a companion piece focusing on red wine grapes. Fix.com did a great job bringing the words to image-rich life, and that seems to have resonated with, well, with a lot of people. The white wine version in particular has been popping up all over the Internet, and has apparently become one of the more shared and viewed pieces of content I have yet written.

Maybe I need to start drawing instead of writing?

Anyway, I’m including the large-format infographics of both articles below, for your image-rich-viewing pleasure. Some of you geeks will be tempted to scoff and harrumph (is that a verb?) at what I considered to be “off-the-beaten-path” grapes (“Dude, WTF?!?? Where’s Gouais blanc, you a-hole!!!”), but please keep in mind the context, folks: this was all done for an audience that’s likely drinking the usual wine suspects. Think Chardonnay, Cabernet Sauvignon, Sauvignon Blanc, Muscato, Pinot Grigio, Merlot, and Pinot Noir.

If we get those drinkers even thinking about alternatives like Chenin Blanc, Vermentino, Barbera, and Cabernet Franc then we’re doing good by the wine world in general, and maybe even opening up a few minds to some new and interesting experiences…

And so it’s time for another round up of the monthly Wine.Answers.com articles for your perusal.

If you’re looking for Halloween wine recommendations, I resisted revisiting that same old ground this year (so for that, you’ll just have to check out last year’s version, which still holds up just fine). Anyway, here’s the skinny on the October 2014 installments:

A book about wine caves. Who knew? And it’s actually a damned good one, too, and some of those tricky photos therein are downright amazing. Worth a look, even if it’s limited to the caves of California wine country only.

My minor love affair with Sicily’s Donnafugata continues, this time in asking their jazz-singing marketing and quality guru Jose Rallo to give us an overview of what to expect from Moscato wine. Best to read this one with a glass of Zibibbo in hand, I’d say.

Alessandro wanted to know if I’d pen a feature for Cdb on the wine scene in America. “Which wine scene in America?” was my initial response, to which he more-or-less replied “all of them.” Capturing the trends and current happenings of all of the most important wine regions in the U.S. just seemed a challenge too cool to turn down, so I said yes. A crap-ton of work then ensued (I am over 40 now, so the chances that I will someday learn not to accept these workloads is probably approaching zero).

The finished article is now available (in Italian, of course, thanks to Alessandro’s translation), and it looks great (hopefully the text lives up to the presentation!). What was probably the most difficult part of the assignment was coming up with a list of thirty wines that I thought served as both an introduction to American wine, and as a faithful representation of American wine trends overall.

That part was… well, “ridiculously hard” seems somewhat appropriate. For sh*ts and giggles, I’m presenting the final list of those selected wines below. It’s certainly California/Pacific NW-heavy, but when you consider the fact that those regions account for well over 90% of all of the wine produced in the U.S., any other approach would’ve been totally disingenuous to the spirit of the article. I am quite sure that I will piss off no small number of the wine world with these selections, and most criticism that I failed to include wine/region/trend such-and-such will no doubt have some justifications. Against my better judgment, I have included short blurbs on why I choose the wines that I did.

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